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Cloud standards profiles – Taking interoperability from a best practice to a common practice

When it comes to adopting emerging technologies, standardisation is essential user and market confidence. People won’t use technologies they don’t trust. Users are increasingly concerned about the lack of control, interoperability and portability, which are central to avoiding vendor lock-in, whether at the technical, service delivery or business level. Open standards are all about protecting consumers. But who knows which standards are best for them? CloudWATCH may have a way forward.

How have we identified the cloud standard profiles?

CloudWATCH has created a portfolio of European and international use cases to identify common requirements from a security and interoperability perspective. We have used these to develop and test a set of common standards profiles around federated cloud services. In defining the cloud standard profiles, we have carried out an in-depth empirical analysis of 38 different cloud use cases. Using the characteristics of cloud computing, as defined by NIST, we have clustered them around certain characteristics and defined their priority levels.

What is a cloud standard profile?

A Standard very often supports multiple use cases in its specification text which can lead to ambiguity and a lack of real interoperability across different interfaces. A profile on a standard however, clarifies in an unambiguous way how a standard has to be interpreted, explaining how to implement it based on a specific use case.